New challenge!

Like so many others I was thrilled to usher out 2009. I had been laid off unexpectedly the week of Thanksgiving and had pretty much had a shite year overall financially speaking. Telecom has been suffering from a real lack of innovation the last few years in the enterprise space and pricing has followed suit. Products that were considered to have individual and compelling business value just a few years ago are commodities today. Add that to ever-rising sales quotas and product value:quota retirement and you get the picture. Bigger goals and extreme difficulty in reaching them. Those with accounts with business models requiring ever growing geographies continue to do ok (regional banks, service providers, etc), but if an account manager's deck didn't include accounts requiring more and more bandwidth achieving a goal that represents a 50% increase becomes difficult. All in all, my original intent in going to grad school in the first place was to move into another area of technology anyway.
My severance from big telecom as it turns out was the best thing that could have happened to me. I've never really worked networking tools like Facebook or LinkedIn as diligently as some folks I know, but I do pay attention. If nothing else, it's nice to keep in touch with people that I really like that I don't get to see as often as I once did. People move between companies fairly often now whether that's internal colleagues or customers. The internet makes keeping in touch pretty easy. I got extremely lucky when an old friend from big telecom (we were on the same sales team years ago) pinged me to discuss a role at his software company. Talk about serendipity! The interview process moved quickly and I was out of work for only 5 weeks total. I essentially look at it as a much needed vacation in which I got a TON of those stupid little home projects completed. While I didn't ride as much as I would have thought, the overall break was productive and I'm psyched to back at it, learning something completely new, and being part of a smaller (2,000 employees worldwide), flatter, and more nimble organization.
Here's to 2010: new opportunities, fresh outlook, the Winter Olympics, getting my braces OFF, continuing to pick off home re-modeling projects, etc.